Visiting the Trombay Fishers Cooperative Society in the months spanning July - September 2022, we witnessed firsthand the procedure for claiming Government aid for the Maha and Kyar cyclones that had struck the Western coast of India in late 2019.

Reviewing the 2020 Maharashtra Government Resolution (GR) that described the rules for administering aid for Maha and Kyar cyclones, we saw that it made a special provision of providing funds for ice boxes to “small fish vendors”.

Virtually all fish vendors are women. This raised the question of why the Government was distributing funds for purchasing ice boxes to women fishers? Did ice boxes provide adequate relief for the business losses suffered due to the cyclones?

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Government Resolution (2008) disbursing Ex-gratia aid against fish drought declaration demand by fisher community

Turns out that a similar GR to the 2020 one was issued in 2008. It was similar in two aspects. First, it issued a similar aid package.

Second, both the GRs issued the aid package to fishers only when fisher communities demanded the declaration of ‘matsya dushkaal’ (fish drought).

While we began with the question of
“Why ice box as a relief for cyclones?”



the question of
“What is fish drought and what connection does it have to cyclone relief?”

emerged as even more important.

The term ‘matsya dushkal’ (fish drought) is not new but constitutes proof of the tug of war between the fishers and the government of Maharashtra since at least 1960. Looking at the timing of the GRs announcing state funding and the committee formed by the Government to assess if there is fish drought, a pattern has emerged.


Every time fisher communities demand a response from the Government to the crisis of ‘no fish in the sea’, the Government responds with a band aid solution: it announces a package of (limited) aid and appoints a committee to decide whether there is indeed a fish drought.

In all cases, the committee later declares that the phenomenon of fish drought doesn't exist, except for once in 1979-80 when fish drought was partially conceded but only for a specific coastal district (Ratnagiri) and only for those employing specific types of fish gear (trawlers and rapan).

And this time again, in response to the demand, the government declared relief for the Maha and Kyar cyclone and appointed a committee to assess the situation.

To understand why fishers are demanding a fish drought in the first place, we need to understand what they mean by fish drought.

Small-scale fishers in the seas and creeks of Maharashtra see fish drought arising due to the slow violence faced from multiple entangled human and natural factors. These include overfishing due to the promotion of large-scale commercialized forms of fishing, pollution, and urban development projects in the sea/ coast.

After the destruction of the Maha and Kyar cyclones in 2019, fishers have for the first time demanded the declaration of a fish drought. This adds one more factor to the array of those they see as already causing slow violence to the seas and to themselves – those due to cyclones and storm surges that are now being felt in the Arabian Sea.

The year 2019-20 was particularly difficult for fisher communities. An Indian Meteorological Department Report (2019) states that the Arabian Sea experienced 5 major cyclones in 2019 against the normal of one per year.

It was not just the severity of the Maha and Kyar cyclones, which followed one another within a few months, but the cascading effect of several cyclones in 2019 that severely affected fishers’ livelihoods.

The COVID-19 lockdown further aggravated this situation. The inability to go fishing or to sell fish due to closure of markets caused major business losses for all fishers. These damages fishers could not absorb. And from the inadequate amounts of aid distributed, neither it seemed was the Government ready to absorb them.

The causes of fish drought and its devastating effects on the livelihood of the fishers have long histories and are felt over an extended period, just like that of the more commonly known agricultural drought.

Fishers’ demand to declare there is a fish drought is not just about the two severe cyclones that passed through their shores and the series of unfortunate events occurring that year.

It also has to do with the history of human intervention in the creek and sea for decades.

The demand for Matsya Dushkal brings into focus the long periodicity of the event, unlike other sudden and spectacular disasters.

The Marathi version of ‘fish drought’ that fishers use or ‘matsya dushkal’ points towards the tremendous length of the event and the uncertainty of its duration.

‘Kal’ refers to a measure of time that conveys an era or a long period without a clear beginning and end point.

Fishers’ demand for the Government to declare a fish drought can be understood as an effort to compel the Government to open up a space for new negotiation on an ongoing issue and take immediate preventative action.

It means talking about something that has been happening, but is ignored, for years..

The spectacular event of the cyclones cracked wide open fault lines and inequalities that had long existed. Fishers through their struggle to declare a fish drought sought to shift policy attention from the spectacular, one-time calamity of the cyclone toward realization that we are in the midst of a slow-onset disaster of fish drought, one whose beginnings and endings are difficult to measure, that persists over time, and whose cascading and devastating effects ripple out unevenly and unpredictably over time and space.

In February 2020, Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, an NGO working on the issues of fishers in coastal Maharashtra, organised India’s first Fish Drought Conference with the support of regional and national fisher associations and leaders from the Shiv Sena Party. At the conference, fisher leaders countered the official position of the Government based on ‘official’ data that there is no fish drought, with their lived experience.

Even though the Government didn’t declare a fish drought this time round either, the fishers won some partial concessions. The GR dispensing relief for the Maha and Kyar cyclone referred to the earlier 2008 GR that mentioned “fish drought demand” raised by fishers.

It also acknowledged that a “drought-like situation” (मत्स्य दुष्काळ सदृश्य परस्थिती) exists. Importantly, while aid of only Rs.30 million was allocated from the State and National Disaster Relief Fund that disburses relief for cyclones, an additional ex-gratia aid of 650 million was announced by the Maharashtra Fisheries Department. The additional funds, fisher leaders claimed, was a result of their mobilisation.

Thus even though a fish drought wasn’t declared, this is a one-step win for fisher communities in bringing policy attention to the dire but largely invisible issue of fish drought.

The pressure from organised fishing federations has compelled the State Government to constitute committees to measure fish production and assess whether fish drought is indeed happening.

Since at least 1960, such committees have sought to scrutinize the method of calculating fish production in order to get a clearer picture of local scarcity based on area, species, and fishing techniques.

But a fish drought has never been declared, except in a partial manner in 1979-80, because the Government’s formula that uses two criteria for determining fish drought- the calculation of fish production and estimating fish scarcity- have never been fulfilled.

This approach to measuring fish drought and the verdict of ‘no drought’ is deeply contested by fishers.

The decades-old formula for determining drought is if the fish production of the year in question falls below 50% of the average fish production of the last 3 years.

In 2019-20, when fishers insisted there was a drought, the committee set up by the fisheries department said that the production had not fallen below 6-10% and therefore there was no drought. Fishing communities challenged this in two ways.

01
First, they argued that fish drought is a dynamic and slow-onset event, caused by multiple factors like pollution, infrastructure, and overfishing, that affect different communities within fishing in different ways. It therefore cannot be measured solely on the metric of production.

The limitations of studying only fish production figures was seen in the case of the women fishers of Trombay Koliwada who rely on drying javla (a type of small shrimp) from October to May and suffered major losses in 2022 when the javla started blackening. Women speculated that this was caused by low sunlight due to cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and pollution due to bridge construction in the creek waters.

While the exact reasons for the blackening of the javla were never traced and the business losses worth lakhs of rupees per fisherwoman were never accounted for, the production of the javla was not affected.

Only its quality was affected as it became unsellable and uneatable. This shows how certain fishers in a particular locality can be deeply affected by unpredictable, hyperlocal phenomena without disturbing the overall production figures.

02
Second, fisher communities challenged the Government’s production numbers saying that they were far from the on-ground experiences of fishers.

They gave the example of small scale fishers who often come back from the sea with poor catches mainly consisting of plastic and smaller fish, while larger, mechanised boats using extractive techniques of fishing (such as purse seine nets, LED lights) can still get good catches due to which the overall statistics of fish production don't reveal a significant shortfall.

Fisher leaders have observed that the Maharashtra fisheries department is both understaffed and unable or unwilling to check the illegal fishing practices of bigger boat owners.

Fishers also say that fisheries departments are subject to tremendous pressure from their state government to declare (erroneously) high fish production numbers, unlike the central public agency for fisheries research, the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI).

As evidence of this, fishing communities have highlighted the significant difference between the fish production data of CMFRI, and the Maharashtra fisheries department. Based on fishers’ evidence, a Marathi newspaper, the Tarun Bharat, published an article showing the divergence between CMFRI figures and the state fisheries figures. So much so that the CMFRI data actually shows fish drought-like conditions whereas the state fisheries data does not.

Marathi Newspaper Tarun Bharat comparing the data of CMFRI and Fisheries department

Due to the pressure from fishing communities, the data discrepancies spotlighted by the Marathi media was likely an important factor prompting the fisheries department to sign an agreement with CMFRI from 2023 to conduct joint data collection and analysis.

Since CMFRI is a central agency, and it is under no obligation to show high state production figures, the fishing communities consider this a win in their longrunning negotiations with the Government.

While talking to officials of the Fisheries Department we realised that there are no fixed mechanisms in place to periodically monitor the fish drought situation.

No single policy document at the state or national level lays down a methodology or standard operating procedure for analysing fish drought annually.

There is no fish drought manual, as there is for agricultural drought, that specifies methodologies and operating protocols to measure and respond to agricultural drought.

Fish drought is different from agricultural drought for many reasons but being in the early stages of the struggle to get recognized, is itself a major difference.

Though the struggle to get agricultural drought declared plays out every year, nobody questions its existence or validity.

This is in stark contrast to the phenomenon of fish drought.

Fisher communities are well aware of the fact that the mere declaration of drought is not going to solve their problems. Past committees formed by the state government to assess fish drought have recommended measures like adjournment of loan instalments and providing subsidies on fish seeds if fish drought is found to exist.

These measures are clearly aimed at providing temporary relief and are quite insufficient to deal with a slow onset disaster like fish drought whose causes and consequences have long temporalities that go well beyond just the drought year.

And yet fish drought as a concept and the politics that fishers deploy when mobilising this concept has tremendous power.

Fishing communities assert fish drought in public meetings and representations with bureaucrats and politicians in order to make an invisible on-going disaster visible.

By demanding the Government declare it in the present, they seek official/public acknowledgement that this phenomenon exists without doubt. Once publicly acknowledged, it becomes possible to urge wider actions and dialogue to address it.

A seemingly simple question of ‘why iceboxes for women’ against the damage by the cyclone led us to explore the on-going disaster that fishers call fish drought, showing how damage to certain marginalised groups within the fishing community and the city-region can be under-assessed if not completely excluded, compared to relatively more privileged groups.

Fish drought as a concept helps articulate fishers’ own experience of inhabiting and navigating the unjust and uncertain terrain of already changed and changing climates.

In asserting that the reduction of fish is an indicator/symptom of something much bigger, happening not just inside the sea but at a planetary-wide scale, we understand fish drought as part of a local vocabulary exemplifying climate change that is offered to us by the coastal communities of Maharashtra.